July 13, 2010
I finally, after months, decided to read a blog of two today. This article was first, and it came at just the right time.
July 8, 2010
Lucy: “If God was made of glass, and had a thing in his back so you could wind Him up, like a wind-up bunny, then he could go up to the sky and come back down from the sky.”
And later in the same car ride…
Craig: “Have you ever tried to talk to Jesus?”
Lucy: “No, I’m too shy of him.”
June 20, 2010
We were watching Brother Sun, Sister Moon last night, which scared Lucy is so many places (she doesn’t like feverish people, or strange looking crucifixes, or lepers…). The frolicking in the fields was a bit more 70s than I cared for, although Samantha enjoyed pointing out every flower, bird and dog (=sheep). When the crowd came and they opened San Damiano, Lucy said,
“I want to go to church with flowers. And ducks.”
Me too, Lucy, me too.
April 8, 2010
I love the Latin with the double u’s. And we had occasion over the past weekend to find out the real reason that we get Easter Monday off of school. It’s to allow people with small children to recover from the Triduum.
Or not, since I think that’s probably just us. But we survived it – two hours on Holy Thursday with an un-napped three-year-old, two hours Good Friday, and over three hours on Holy Saturday. Here’s the blow-by-blow. Read more...
March 30, 2010
“The main barrier standing between ourselves and a local-food culture is not price, but attitude. The most difficult requirements are patience and a pinch of restraint–virtues that are hardly the property of the wealthy. These virtues seem to find precious little shelter, in fact, in any modern quarter of this nation founded by Puritans. Furthermore, we apply them selectively: browbeating our teenagers with the message that they should wait for sex, for example. Only if the wait to experience intercourse under the ideal circumstances (the story goes), will they know its true value. ’Blah blah blah,‘ hears the teenager: words issuing from a mouth that can’t even wait for the right time to eat tomatoes, but instead consumes tasteless ones all winter to satisfy a craving for everything now. We’re raising our children on the definition of promiscuity if we feed them a casual, indiscriminate mingling of foods from every season plucked from the supermarket, ignoring how our sustenance is cheapened by whole sale desires.” Read more...
February 24, 2010
“The Lord, your God, has chosen you from all the nations on the face of the earth to be a people peculiarly his own.”
-Deuteronomy 7:6
This was part of the reading of the Morning Office today, and it really struck me. Forgive me if I stretch the translation a little! You might think, hearing that God’s people are “peculiar” I would be a little concerned. But no, this is actually comforting to me, because I’ve been feeling a little peculiar lately. Mostly when I’m out in public. For example, when at a Catholic schools week dinner, the Ave Maria melts seamlessly, without even a breath of pause, into the Pledge of Allegiance, complete with gigantic waving flag on the projector screen. I know that I blanched at the juxtaposition of the two; it was like being punched in the gut. And once the whiteness passed, I wondered how I could sit in a room and continue to smile and make small talk. Read more...
February 20, 2010
“My great-great-grandmother, great-grandmother, grandmother, mother are all alive for me because they are part of my story. My children and grandchildren and I tell stories about Hugh, my husband. We laugh and we remember–re-member. I tell stories about my friend, the theologian Canon Tallis, who was far more than my spiritual director, with whom I had one of those wonders, a spiritual friendship. I do not believe that these stories are their immortality–that is something quite different. But remembering their stories is the best way I know to have them remain part of my mortal life. And I need them to be part of me, while at the same time I am quite willing for them all to be doing whatever it is that God has in mind for them to do. Can those who are part of that great cloud of witnesses which has gone before us be in two places at once? I believe that they can, just as Jesus could, after the Resurrection.” Read more...
February 13, 2010
“There was a time when good academic qualifications guaranteed a job, but not any more. One reason is academic inflation. In the next 30 years, more people worldwide will be gaining academic qualifications than since the beginning of history. But as more people get them, their currency value is falling sharply. A university degree used to be an open sesame to a professional position. The minimum requirement for some jobs is now a Master’s degree, even a PhD. What next? But there is a second problem. Many companies are facing a crisis in graduate recruitment. It’s not that there aren’t enough graduates to go around; there are more and more. But too many don’t have what business urgently needs: they can’t communicate well, they can’t work in teams and they can’t think creatively. But why should they? University degrees aren’t designed to make people creative. They are designed to do other things and often do them well. But complaining that graduates aren’t creative is like saying, “I bought a bus and it sank”. Read more...
